The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

Category: Universities

Four Ways to Three

The Ontario Minister of Training, Colleges and Universities, Glen Murray, has a bee in his bonnet about three-year undergraduate degrees. Basically, he’s been told there’s some fiscal consolidation coming, and he thinks three-year degrees are the way that institutions can deal with the coming troubles without – allegedly – affecting quality. There’s nothing inherently wrong with three-year degrees. All over Europe they are now standard (although in many countries, 80-90% of bachelor’s graduates go on to do a two-year Master’s

Read More »
August 21, 2012 3 Comments

Fall 2012: You’ve Been Warned

As we’re coming to the end of the school year, it’s worth looking ahead a bit to what we can expect next year.  You know, so you can obsess about it all summer before coming home. Public finances are only going to get worse.  Most provincial governments made their budget forecasts at a time when it looked like the US economy might be reaching take-off speed; that speed has now been firmly downgraded to “stall.” Throw in the non-negligible possibilities

Read More »
June 20, 2012 No Comments

Uniquely Universal

Universities are astonishing, unbelievably resilient entities. Clark Kerr once noted that of the 75 Western institutions founded before 1520 (and which have survived intact to the present day), sixty of them are universities. But universities aren’t merely unique in their reach across time – they are also unique in their reach across space. Few if any institutions are as truly global as a university. The basics of a campus are instantly recognizable whether you are in Nairobi, Tianjin or Regina.

Read More »
June 18, 2012 2 Comments

Bibliometrics: Measuring Zero-Impact

Bibliometrics aren’t just useful for analyzing who’s being cited; they are also pretty good at telling you who’s not being cited, too. Today, we’ll look at professors whose H-index (see here for a reminder of how it is calculated) is zero – that is, professors who have either never been published or (more likely) never been cited. There are three reasons why a scholar might have an H-index of zero. The first is age; younger scholars are less likely to

Read More »
June 14, 2012 1 Comment

Bibliometrics: Who’s the Best?

Today, we released the full version of our bibliometric paper, showing H-index averages on a discipline-by-discipline basis. You can find it here. (Keep in mind while reading it that the H-index isn’t a wholly straightforward statistic to interpret. If one discipline has an H-index of 10 and another has an H-index of five, you can’t simply say that professors in one discipline publish twice as much as the other. An H-index is just the largest number of publications for which

Read More »
June 13, 2012 1 Comment
Load More

One Thought to Start Your Day

One Thought to Start Your Day is our founder and CEO Alex Usher’s popular daily blog, brimming with up-to-the-minute insights and informed opinions on today’s higher education industry.

Subscribe

Search Posts

Search Publications

Social Media

Linkedin Youtube Spotify

Recent Posts

More thoughts on...